Typological portrayals of black Christians or black proto-Christians in missionary texts from late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish America acknowledge black men’s and women’s interiority and intellectual capacities, whatever their level of civility, as a means of justifying their ability to become Christians. The juxtaposition of three generic types of black subjects in this chapter demonstrates that even as racial hierarchies in the Iberian world were cohering and increasingly associating blackness with bodies direly in need of civilizing tutelage, theological discourse left open a loophole for conceiving of black intellectual capacities and spiritual virtue.